It’s not just for his showmanship; Italians also appreciate his hard work as a retail politician and electoral strategist. Berlusconi has not only made his business-friendly, antibureaucracy agenda commendably clear in a country where party manifestoes do not exist, but has also cobbled together an effective coalition of disparate, sometimes hostile, elements on the center-right. No other conservative politician has had the patience, the guile, or the charisma to do the same. And this ability to hold a coalition together has paid off. Berlusconi is the only postwar Italian premier to have served a full five-year term. That’s not just a record; it has also contributed to Italy’s stability and coherence.

Which prompted this letter to the editor:

Both Panorama and Il Foglio, for which William Ward is the London correspondent, are owned by the Berlusconi family. You should have disclosed that the author of “Berlusconi the Bold,” “a defense of Italy’s prime minister,” is, in fact, one of Silvio Berlusconi’s employees.
Pietro Slavich, Paris, France

Yeah, should have.

Shorter Tim Graham, News Buttsters
WaPo’s Milbank Decries ‘Hateful and Gruesome’ Hill Protest, Thrown by ‘Party of No Taste’

• Reporters should only report on the nice signs carried by teabaggers. Oh, and another thing, Mr. Dana Smartypants Milbank, if pictures of fetuses are so gruesome, how come you are such an abortion lover?

Not Noticeably Shorter Pam Atlas, Escorts Against Islam:
MUSLIM TERROR ATTACK: ‘NINE shot dead’ 12 30 Wounded, Mass Shooting at Fort Hood, US Army Base, Malik Nadal Hasan is MUSLIM CONVERT

Nvidia Rumored to Compete in Supposedly Uncompetitive Market

By Elizabeth Jacobson

Rumors abound that graphics chip maker Nvidia is getting set to enter the x86 processor market. Recall that, according to AMD’s lawyers, the processor market is uncompetitive and being unfairly monopolized by Intel.

Now, if the antitrust lawyers are correct, and the CPU market is uncompetitive and needs government intervention, then there must be some barriers to entry that are keeping other competitors out of the market, allowing Intel to reap outrageous profits. However, if Nvidia can and does enter the processor market and supply an alternative processor product line, where would that leave the antitrust argument?

We’re not sure where it would leave the antitrust argument since it has no relevance to it, but such a development would certainly raise questions as to whether Intel itself is as uniquely great at making CPUs as it constantly claims to be.

Snappy answers to stupid questions, etc., but let’s go a little deeper:

1. Nvidia already commissions ARM-based CPUs on its Tegra platform for CE devices (the Zune HD for example).

2. Via already makes ultra-low power x86 CPUs that compete with Intel’s Atom.

3. Most importantly, the period of time when Intel allegedly behaved anti-competitively is not today and certainly not whatever tomorrow that Nvidia happens to build an x86 central processor business.*

Instead, Intel is charged with illegal anti-competitive practices in a very specific time frame, from roughly 2000 to 2006, during which period AMD began shipping its possibly superior Athlon and Opteron products, yet found difficulty at every turn distributing them to OEMs.

We can’t know what would have happened in that period if Intel hadn’t used its bigger pocketbook to essentially buy its way through this period of competitive disadvantage to AMD without losing its dominant market share. We can guess that AMD might have grown its share to 30 or 40 percent of the market in several processor segments instead of peaking at 25 percent.

What we do know is that the credible competition from AMD certainly seems to have lit a fire of innovation under Intel’s ass in the early to mid-2000s, and Intel later countered AMD with superior Intel products from roughly 2006 to today. That part of the competition played out as it should in organic fashion, but the part where AMD grabbed market share during its own period of superiority obviously never happened … and it’s pretty clear to many people why it didn’t.

*Though it’s worth noting that Intel has told Nvidia it can’t make integrated graphics products for Intel’s current-generation Nehalem architecture, per their cross-license, a point which Nvidia disputes, and which also might explain why Nvidia is even tempted to get into the x86 CPU game in the first place, seeing as how Intel might be perceived as attempting to drive them out of business.

Now this is the type of hilarious bullshit that makes me love Erick Erickson:

In NY-23, Conservatives Win

Posted by Erick Erickson

The race has now been called for Democrat Bill Owens.

This is a huge win for conservatives.

Except the “win” in this case is a humiliating loss where you drummed a winning Republican candidate out of the race and handed the Democrats a seat they haven’t held since the 19th century.

First, the GOP now must recognize it will either lose without conservatives or will win with conservatives. In 2008, many conservatives sat home instead of voting for John McCain. Now, in NY-23, conservatives rallied and destroyed the Republican candidate the establishment chose.

And what was the final result? Oh right! The Democrats won the seat! A seat they hadn’t won since the 19th century! A seat that they would have assuredly still lost had not the right-wing freak show descended upon rural New York. Please, please say you’ll make this a blueprint for other races, Erick. Please, please…

For all intents and purposes, NY-23 is a trial run for Florida.

There is a God. Erickson and his goon squad are now going on a jihad to replace all semi-non-insane Republicans with unelectable assholes. Could I just die today? Because I don’t think I’ll ever have more fun for the rest of my life.

Not me, but K-Lo after the sixth mudslide to drown the sorrows of NY-23:

Owens Wins [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Watch it be spun as a defeat for Sarah Palin and the hateful extreme right-wing of the Republican party (Hi! See George Pataki standing next to me?).

That may have made sense to a distraught K-Lo while a vodka buzz and a sugar high were competing for her few remaining brain cells, but honestly what the fuck is this supposed to mean exactly? That the Hoffman defeat was really a victory for the Republican party and a defeat for the Democrats? Or that Hoffman wasn’t part of the extreme right? That George Pataki is part of the extreme right? I think its time for K-Lo to put one of those drunk dialing contraptions on her laptop that will freeze her keyboard if she blows more than 0.15 into the little tube.

UPDATE: And speaking of crazed reactionaries, TBogg alerts us that Confederate Yankee is a-itchin’ t’ bayonet some hippies:

If our lawmakers abandon the founding principles of this nation, and use their power to obfuscate, deceive, bully and strip basic rights away from the people, then they are forfeit to thesocial contract, even if they have managed to “abide” by the laws they’ve written in support of the state.

Ultimately, laws are only lawful if the govern find them fair and justified. All else is dogma.

And so when power-mad legislatures and executives use direct lies and emotional rhetoric in order to deceive their constituencies in an attempt at tyranny that serves to increase their power while undermining the principles that has enabled this government of the people, for the people and by the people, we owe them no more allegiance.

One may even begin to speculate on whether we owe them civility for their transgressions, which amount to a fundamental betrayal of oursocial contract as Americans.

Unlike other nations and states in times both past and present, we have the possibility of correcting our mistakes and removing the disloyal via the ballot instead of the barrel of a gun.

Let us hope that our elected officials recognize, however, that our patience is not finite, nor our obligation to bear their indecent assault on our liberties unlimited.

I’m struck by how often I’ve read right-wing blog posts that have slowly degenerated into outright murder fantasies. You wonder why they even bother writing long, plausibly deniable justifications for them and don’t just skip to “ME KILL YOU SCUM!!!” and leave it at that.

The amateur detectives and kerning squads of the wingnut blogosphere have been embarrassing themselves lately with the newly-released White House visitor list, apparently unaware that different people can have the same names. Nobody, of course, jumps to a foolish conclusion faster and with more invigorating elan than Jim Hoft, aka the Gateway Pundit, who is convinced that one of the visitors to the White House is Angela Davis, an open member of the Communist Party USA and close buddy of Fidel Castro. This is further proof, of course, that Obama is a Communist parading around as a Democrat just so that he can hoist the hammer and sickle over the White House and force all American children to work on collectivist goat cheese farms.

Now, of course, it’s just plain stupid for people to imagine that the William Ayers on the White House list is, you know, the “ghost writer” for the illiterate President. Everyone knows that Obama is smart enough to make sure that his real confabs with Ayers are top, toppity, top-top secret, are conducted in disguise (usually with fake moustaches, dishdashas, and Ray-Bans), and aren’t conducted in the Oval Office but instead in the basement of a suburban safe house. But the Angela Davis mistake is, well, just flat-out, mouth-slobbering, nose-picking-in-public stupid. Both people named “Angela Davis” on the White House list have different middle initials than Angela Y. Davis, the person that Hoft was thinking about, although in Hoft’s case the word “thinking” is merely a metaphorical representation of the random synapse firing that causes Hoft to wake up with a start from time to time from continual bouts of narcolepsy.

Hoft links to an obscure wingnut blog that was pushing the Angela Davis story apparently unaware that the blog was later shamed into acknowledging its mistake and came up with one of the more novel fail recovery arguments ever. The list, you see, was larded with common and easily mistaken names as a crude practical joke designed to trap conservative bloggers into saying something stupid. Yowser. That’s like blaming the bottle of vodka for a DWI . . . and really meaning it.

Mark Finkelstein, News Blusters
Politico’s Politicized Pic Picks

• Further proof of persistent media bias: a picture of Democrat David Plouffe is smoking hot but one of Rush Limbaugh is not. In fact, I’d do Plouffe in a heartbeat, but Rush Limbaugh, well, as they say, not even with your penis.

It’s almost Halloween. This means that Dr. Tintin has a treat for you, and you don’t even have to turn any tricks to get it. So, hold out your trick-or-treat bags, Sadlynauts, and let Dr. Tintin dump into them a whole mess of Kimberly Daniels. And before you start bitching and fussing and moaning and asking why we aren’t passing out mini-Snickers and Take Five bars like everybody else, I have one thing to say: Kimberly Daniels is so crazy that her column got yanked from Pat Robertson’s site. Now, that shut you up, didn’t it?

Fortunately for us, Kimberly’s posting was mercifully preserved by the kind folks at Charisma and by the Google cache.

Halloween—October 31—is considered a holiday in the United States. In fact, it rivals Christmas with regard to how widely celebrated it is.

Why am I just now being told Halloween’s a holiday? For all these years I’ve been going into the office every Halloween not knowing that the office was closed and that I could have stayed home, put on women’s clothing and gone around the neighborhood asking for free candy.

But is Halloween a holiday that Christians should be observing?

Anyone want to venture a guess here? But first, let’s make up how the holiday was named and throw in some extra Satan:

The root word of Halloween is “hallow,” which means “holy, consecrated and set apart for service.” If this holiday is hallowed, whose service is it set apart for? The answer to that question is very easy—Lucifer’s!

Silly me. And here I was under the foolish impression that Halloween was dedicated to the service of Mars candy and Hershey’s chocolate and the three hundred factories or so in Taiwan and China that make those hyper-flammable plastic costumes sold at your local big box store.

The key word in discussing Halloween is “dedicated.” It is dedicated to darkness and is an accursed season. During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed. A time-released curse is a period that has been set aside to release demonic activity and to ensnare souls in great measure.

Time-released curses? Who else thinks that somebody has seen one too many time-released Ambien CR commercials on the teevee? (Somnambulism with amnesia of the event has been reported. Do not drive or operate machinery while cursed. If you experience a curse lasting more than four hours, immediately consult your pastor)

During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

Well, that explains a lot. Just yesterday I was wondering where all the witches in my neighborhood had gone and now I know that they’re all in Hershey, Pennsylvania, praying over vats of chocolate. I suppose that’s why that dark chocolate Hershey’s Kiss I had yesterday had a slight aftertaste of newt blood and goat semen.

I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.

Now, wait a minute. Is Kimberly telling us that demons are smart enough to talk my grandmother into committing sodomy with stray cats while howling at the moon but are too stupid to figure out whether a piece of candy comes from a store or a trick-or-treat bag? I call bullshit.

When nice church folk lay out their pumpkins on the church lawn, fill their baskets with nuts and herbs, and fire up their bonfires, the demons get busy. They have no respect for the church grounds. They respect only the sacrifice and do not care if it comes from believers or non-believers.

Put a pumpkin on your porch and you’re just three demonic Raisinettes away from cutting out your next door neighbor’s liver and frying it up with some bacon, onions and diced puppy ears.

The danger of Halloween is not in the scary things we see but in the secret, wicked, cruel activities that go on behind the scenes. These activities include:

· Sex with demons
· Orgies between animals and humans
· Animal and human sacrifices
· Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood
· Rape and molestation of adults, children and babies
· Revel nights
· Conjuring of demons and casting of spells
· Release of “time-released” curses against the innocent and the ignorant.

Why do I never get invited to the good Halloween parties? The most frightening thing that ever happened to me at one was when some guy dressed up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz had had one too many vodkas and started lifting his dress up over his head.

Chuckles “Chris Crocker” Krauthammer is tired of people being mean to his favoritest president of all-time, George W. Bush:

In the Barack Obama version, there are 50 or so such blame-Bush free passes before the gig is up. By my calculation, Obama has already burned through a good 49. Is there anything he hasn’t blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad — everything but swine flu.

Let’s go through each of these one by one, shall we?

The economy went into recession in December 2007. This was on Bush’s watch.

George Bush tore up the Kyoto Protocol and couldn’t even bring himself to acknowledge that climate change was a problem.

The credit crisis? See when the recession started.

Bush spent eight years doing nothing to negotiate peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and gave Ariel Sharon a thumbs up to just about anything he wanted.

As for the deficit — well now that you mention it, Chuckles, Obama inherited that too. And look: when you couple an inherited deficit with the worst recession since the 1930s, you’re going to get an even bigger deficit. If Obama had come into office and had decided to make deficit reduction his top priority, he’d be getting (rightfully) blamed for plunging the country into a second Great Depression.

And lastly, anti-Americanism abroad. Ah yes, I seem to recall a certain war that really inflamed those feelings. A certain unnecessary debacle in Iraq that was launched on false pretenses. Yes, that was quite sad. And which president launched that war? Oh, right. It was George W. Bush.

Now, I’m not one to say that Obama’s every decision is perfect and must never, ever be questioned. He’s clearly screwed us by continuing to shovel money to the banks and he’s been a flat-out wimp on gay rights issues. But when you look at the sheer number of problems that he’s inherited, you have to at least feel some modicum of sympathy for the guy.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, inherited a country at peace and going through an economic boom. He left it in the midst of two wars and a crippling recession. If that doesn’t put him in the mix for Worst President Evar, I don’t know what does.

UPDATE: Ruh roh:

Here’s a somewhat surprising result from the new Fox News poll. Asked which president is “more responsible for the current state of the economy,” only 18 percent say President Obama. Fifty-eight percent say former President George W. Bush. Nine percent blame both of them. Republicans are the only subgroup of voters who blame Obama, and only by a six-point margin of 35 percent to 29 percent.

Chuckles weeps.

Now onto business:

Y’know, whenever the Anchoress gives us a post title such as this…

Yes, Every Sperm is Sacred!

…she’s begging for a response. So let’s get to it.

The teaching, first off, is not – specifically – “every sperm is sacred,” although, it must be said, when you’re talking sperm and ova you are talking about essences – our essential selves, which are derived from the deepest parts of our beings, and you are talking about the material which was designed specifically for the purpose of assisting God in the creation of humanity.

Question: If you have a wet dream, then, does that technically count as some sort of subconscious sin? If you wake up in the middle of the night and find that you’ve ejaculated, do you have to perform 30 Hail Marys to stop the angel Gabriel from flying into your room and smiting you on site? Also, does this mean that when your dog starts humping the couch that he’s flaunting flouting God’s will? These are important questions.

God loves us into being – we are begotten. Our creation is no accident, but the Love of God made manifest, and the “tools” or “materials” that He uses for that creation – committed love and the mysterious and miraculous products of that love – do, simply by their designation as “tools of God” demand a certain respect and recognition, because they are a great deal more than the equivalent of nasal mucous or earwax.

Which is funny, because to me semen is no less or more appealing than nasal mucous. You would think that if God had intended to make semen a Divine Excretion that He would have done more to hype it up. Say, by making it more sparkly and rainbow colored. Or if every time someone gets off, they hear the sound of a righteous trumpet blasting from their nether-regions.

As to the teaching that every sex act must “hit the target,” (that’s a rather, errr, colorful way to put it), it simply means that every sex act, if it is truly to be respectful of God’s design and creation, must be opened to the possibility of new life, to God and to His will as to whether or not new life will be created.

Subconsciously pulling out at the last minute will lead to an instantaneous smiting, I might add.

How many people do you know who used the pill, used a condom, were diligent in their birth control and STILL got pregnant? It happens all the time. Because the products of our human sexuality contain enormous power – power too many of us simply do not appreciate. And God will do what He will, sometimes, whether you’re open to it or not, in hopes that you WILL become open, and more open, to his loving gifts.

This is flat-out awesome. I never imagined that God Himself was responsible for condoms breaking or for people forgetting to take the pill. He really does have His hands in everything.

The 82nd Annual Academy Awards will be presented on Sunday, March 7, 2010, Academy President Sid Ganis announced today.

There is always a collective wingnut freakout over teh Hollywood left’s big event, but next year’s could be particularly hilarious. Especially if Michael Jackson’s ‘This Is It’ wins an Oscar.

At the very least, his name will get a standing O when they do the dead people roll call … add in a possible shout out to Ted Kennedy and the almost inevitable spontaneous tribute to Roman Polanski by some presenter or award-winner …

The gang at Big Hollywood must already be squirreling away extra portions of seething rage in anticipation.

Then there’s business travel–most places I go, if I lose my ATM card, there’s a Citibank branch that can help e out in the area.

Bancoke of America is pretty good too … (grinds teeth)

David Brooks, The New York Times
The Fatal Conceit

• As a rule, people think that they are much smarter than they really are. This rule is particularly true for Obama and the people in his administration. I am, however, the exception to that rule.

Torkel Torkelson the Red wields his atgeir against Alan Grayson but only manages to impale himself on it:

Alan Grayson is the corpulent congressman from Florida.

Yes, that’s right. Erick just called someone else corpulent. The only reason for this apparent total lack of self-awareness is either that Erick has no full-length mirror at home or he thinks that corpulent is an erudite term for Jewish.

This post would be worthy of note if only for Erickson calling someone else fat, but it deserves a place in the Red State hall of fame for yet another reason:

Today comes word of an even more damning story. A gay couple down in Florida was facing foreclosure. ACORN and Alan Grayson rallied to their cause.

Cheyenne Bowers and his partner David Paxton thought they had gained a valuable ally.

They were in a fight to save their home. He thought a pledge from an eager incoming freshman congressman to help them out through numerous programs might do the trick.

“Expansion of existing federal programs like the FHA loans and the VA loans be more readily available at better terms than we’ve seen up to this point,” said Grayson in December 2008.

The non-profit ACORN along with Grayson invited the media into Bowers and Paxton’s home to talk about fighting the foreclosure crisis, particularly fighting Bowers and Paxton’s foreclosure nightmare.

When the cameras went away, so did Alan Grayson. The foreclosure went through. The couple, in seriously bad health, were put out on the street.

Leaving aside the absurdity of Erickson’s new-found sympathy for a gay couple, which is somewhat akin to Michael Vicks joining the ASPCA and getting all weepy about sled dogs in the Iditarod, the most ridiculous thing here is that the rest of the article that Erick cites completely contradicts his characterization of the incident.

Grayson says he referred Bowers and Paxton to housing counselors, found him an attorney and attempted to get him disability benefits.

But despite all the programs and promises from politicians, it all came down to Household Financial who simply would not budge. …

But at the end of the day Bowers and his partner Paxton were high risk. They had no income. They were disabled, both facing life-threatening illnesses. Bowers needed a liver transplant … .

In the end, no one could force the lender to stop the foreclosure process.

“I’m not some sort of super hero, I don’t have magical powers. I can’t keep people in their homes if they’re not paying their mortgages indefinitely,” Grayson said. …

The couple’s home went up for auction last Thursday, but they had no buyers so that bought them some more time. They are currently still in their home.

So let’s see. Grayson didn’t exactly leave with the cameras. The couple is still in their home. Erickson is too lazy to finish reading a 500-word article or, even more likely, he’s just a disingenuous hack who hoped that no one else would click through his link. But above all Erickson needs, among other things, a full-length mirror installed in his double-wide in Macon. Maybe we should set up a PayPal fund to get him one.

[h/t to commenter Ted the Slacker]

You know that you really can’t go wrong in the easy ridicule department with a column titled “We want you to eat it! Just eat it!” at the amusingly titled “American Thinker.” Adding to the potential for hilarity, the column is penned by one Jeannie Deangelis who describes herself as “a vehemently pro-life, anti-liberal, Evangelical Judeo-Christian Grandmother of the Baptist denomination” and who apparently perfected her chops as a wingnut writing crank letters to the editor, which is what most of these whack jobs spent their time doing before they discovered the Internet.

Jeannie’s column is in the fine, if well-tilled, tradition of wingnut commentary seeking to establish that whatever the Obamas do, no matter how innocuous or otherwise praiseworthy, is a threat to the nation and a frightening harbinger of the day in the not-too-distant future where federal troops will show up at the door and make conservative Americans turn in their Bibles for Korans, participate in gay orgies, and defecate on Glenn Beck’s Christmas sweater.

So what’s gotten Jeannie all bug-eyed and desperate today? Vegetables and exercise. Seriously:

The word “fair” conjures up images of merry-go-rounds, fluffy, pink cones of spun sugar, candy apples and popcorn. Not if you are invited to the White House. Excited Washington DC school children, disembarking from yellow school buses on the South Lawn of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were in for a big shock! The Obamas’ idea of a kid’s fair included sermons extolling the benefits of replacing cake and French fries with vegetables.

Imagine finding out you have the afternoon off and are going to the White House for a “fair.” When you get there you realize the festivities include Michelle doing a hula-hoop demonstration followed by lectures about the advantages of eating foods you hate?

Leaving aside that none of these buffoons went into full meltdown mode when Laura Bush launched her initiative (with the commies at HHS no less) to fight childhood obesity, just how the fuck did telling children to finish their vegetables and get off the couch and get some exercise become a bad thing? Well, of course, when Michelle Obama said it. If Michelle were to deliver a message to teenage girls that they shouldn’t have sex, would these people all of a sudden complain about how the White House is trying to take away the God-given right of teenagers to fuck?